Berlin - Rabbis and Imams biked together throughout Berlin Sunday evening in a show of solidarity between Jews and Muslims.The group took part in Bicycle Week with the motto "Cycling Unites," riding tandem bicycles with one rabbi and one imam on each bike, reports the Berliner (http://bit.ly/1ECkEaC ).

Cyclists started at the Brandenburg Gate and visited Jewish and Muslim institutions throughout the ride.

Project meet2respect, a campaign that promotes bringing together different faiths and providing education, with a specific focus on bringing together Jewish and Muslim faiths, led the ride (http://bit.ly/1OqYnVa ).

Cyclists Ferid Heider, an imam in various Berlin mosque communities, and Daniel Alter, a Berlin rabbi, work together via meet2respect and tour education and community events in Berlin promoting peace.

Hundreds of cyclists joined the rabbis and imams in the ride and followed them on their tour.

If recent elections have taught us anything, it's that young Americans have taken a decided turn to the left. Young voters delivered Obama the election: the under-44 set voted Obama and the over-45 set broke for Romney. The youngest voters, age 18-29, gave Obama a whopping 60 percent of their vote.

Now Republicans have a plan to try to recapture the youngest voters out there: Take over the curriculum in public schools, replace education with a bunch of conservative propaganda, and reap the benefits of having a new generation that can't tell reality from right-wing fantasy.

How well this plan will work is debatable, but in the meantime, these shenanigans present the very real possibility that public school students will graduate without a proper education. To make it worse, many of these attempts to rewrite school curriculum are happening in Texas, which can set the textbook standards for the entire country by simply wielding its power as one of the biggest school textbook markets there is. With that in mind, here's a list of 11 lies your kid may be in danger of learning in school.

Lie No. 1: Racism has barely been an issue in U.S. history and slavery wasn't that big a deal.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute reviewed the new social studies standards laid down by the right-wing-dominated Texas State School Board and found them to be a deplorable example of conservative wishful thinking replacing fact. At the top of list? Downplaying the role that slavery had in starting the Civil War, and instead focusing on "sectionalism" and "states' rights," even though the sectionalism and states' rights arguments directly stemmed from Southern states wanting to keep slavery. There's also a chance your kid might be misled to think post-Civil War racism was no big deal, as the standards excise any mention of the KKK, the phrase "Jim Crow" or the Black Codes. Mention is made of the Southern Democratic opposition to civil rights, but mysteriously, the mass defection of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party to punish the rest of the Democrats for supporting civil rights goes unmentioned.

Lie No. 2: Joe McCarthy was right.

The red-baiting of the mid-20th century has gone down in history, correctly, as a witch hunt that stemmed from irrational paranoia that gripped the U.S. after WWII. But now, according to the Thomas B. Fordham report, your kid might learn that the red baiters had a point: "It is disingenuously suggested that the House Un-American Activities Committee--and, by extension, McCarthyism--have been vindicated by the Venona decrypts of Soviet espionage activities (which had, in reality, no link to McCarthy's targets)." Critical lessons about being skeptical of those who attack fellow Americans while wrapping themselves in the flag will be lost for students whose textbooks adhere to these standards.

Lie No. 3: Climate change is a massive hoax scientists have perpetuated on the public.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been hard at work pushing for laws requiring that climate change denialism be taught in schools as a legitimate scientific theory. Unfortunately, as Neela Banerjee of the L.A. Times reports, they've already had some serious success: "Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change." Other states are taking the "teach the controversy" strategy that helped get creationism into biology classrooms, asking teachers to treat climate change like it's a matter of political debate instead of a scientifically established fact.

The reality is that climate change is a fact that has overwhelming scientific consensus. In 2004, Science reviewed the 928 relevant studies on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 and found that exactly zero of them denied that climate change was a reality, and most found it had man-made causes. To claim that climate change is a "controversy" requires one to believe that there's a massive conspiracy involving nearly all the scientists in the world. So, your kids are not only not learning the realities of climate change, they are also learning, if indirectly, to give credence to conspiracy theory paranoia.

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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/315744_11_Heinous_Lies_Conservatives_#rssSun, 22 Mar 2015 14:26:44 PDTEducation"I look at Barack Obama and I see the worst president of my lifetime" says Dick CheneyThe Mother Of All PiesDirect link to article... [littlegreenfootballs.com]

Former US Vice President Dick Cheney doesn't mince words when it comes to President Barack Obama.

In a new interview for the April issue of Playboy, Cheney repeatedly tore into Obama on a wide array of issues, including the racially charged riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and foreign policy.

"I look at Barack Obama and I see the worst president of my lifetime, without question," Cheney told journalist James Rosen. "I used to have significant criticism of Jimmy Carter, but compared to Barack Obama and the damage he is doing to the nation--it's a tragedy."

On the cover, the interview is billed as "A Fiery Discussion With The Most Powerful Vice President In History" next to a photo of 23-year-old rapper Azealia Banks. Cheney is well known for his unusually active role in shaping the administration of former President George W. Bush, Obama's predecessor.

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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/315652_I_look_at_Barack_Obama_and_I_s#rssTue, 17 Mar 2015 13:28:00 PDTWingnutsPresident U.S. Grant's Home in Detroit to Be MovedThe Mother Of All PiesDirect link to article... [littlegreenfootballs.com]

A house Ulysses S. Grant lived in during his time in Detroit is being evicted from the State Fairgrounds and will be hauled clear across town this summer, likely near Eastern Market.

The house was built in 1837, making it one of the oldest structures in the city. For decades, the house was furnished in period styles and opened to the public as an attraction during the annual State Fair. But now that the fairgrounds are closed and the state is selling the land to developers, Grant's one-time digs have to go.

The state has been in talks about moving the house to the Detroit Edison Public School Academy's campus on St. Aubin, near Gratiot, but it's not quite a done deal. Representatives of the state, the school and architects on the project met at DEPSA on Wednesday to continue discussions.

"Details are still being finalized, but we are honored to bring this historic project to the DEPSA campus," Ralph Bland, the school's superintendent, said in a statement.

The house will definitely be moved, likely this summer, and will stay in Detroit, said Sandra Clark, director of the Michigan Historical Center, which is taking the lead for the state on the home's relocation.

There's also no final agreement on what the house will become, but one thing is clear: This won't be a shrine to Grant just filled with his things and photos.

"Today, we're thinking differently about historical homes and what's the best use for them," said Clark. The idea is to make "them an active educational tool for the school and the public, an interactive way to learn about the history of Detroit. ... We want to put history to work, if you will."

Grant was a young Army officer just four years out of West Point when he was transferred to the Detroit Barracks as regimental quartermaster of the 4th Infantry in the spring of 1849. Detroit was a tiny town at the time -- with only 21,000 people. The future U.S. president and Civil War hero and his wife, Julia Dent Grant, lived in the house from April 1849 through May 1850, according to Kimberly Johnson, a Michigan Historic Commission member who has researched the Grants' time in Detroit. Another house that the Grants lived in during a later time in Detroit was demolished long ago.

Jack Dempsey of Plymouth, president of the Michigan Historical Commission, has been working for years to save the historic structure, which has sat unused and neglected.

"Grant is an iconic figure in American history, a man who, before the Civil War, didn't have much success, but he went on to become the highest-ranking general in the war and saved the union," Dempsey said. "There are a whole number of Grant structures around the country, and Michigan is the only state that has treated one of them like this."

The fact that Grant is one of only two presidents to live in Michigan -- Gerald R. Ford being the other -- makes saving the house even more worthwhile, Dempsey said. Moving the home to near its original location is an added bonus.

As thousands marched across Selma's Edmund Pettus bridge this weekend, a small band of white people were less than a mile away, mourning the loss of the Confederacy and guarding a memorial to a white supremacist.

Live Oak cemetery is a burial site for Confederate soldiers in the civil war and contains the grave of Edmund Winston Pettus, the general - and member of the Ku Klux Klan - after whom the town's bridge was named.

There has been a growing campaign to rename Selma's bridge given its association with the Confederate south, and dozens of students had planned a peaceful march to the cemetery. They quickly changed plans after discovering the neo-Confederates were waiting for them.

"'March' is a military term," explained Todd Kiscaden, 64, who had traveled to Selma from his home in Tennessee to defend the memorial site. "In any military context, if you're going to march on my castle, I'm going to man my barricades."

Selma is most famous for the violent assault on peaceful civil rights marchers on the town's bridge in 1965. But the Alabama town was also the site of another clash: a notorious civil war battle in which Union forces defeated the pro-slavery Confederate army.

The cemetery where Pettus is buried also contains a memorial to the fallen soldiers, and a controversial monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the lieutenant general in the Confederate army and first Grand Wizard of the Klan.

The graveyard has long been a flashpoint between African Americans and pro-Confederate historians in the town. The graveyard has been the focus of protests before; the memorial has been vandalised and, three years ago, a bronze bust of Forrest was stolen. Kiscaden, from the group Friends of Forrest, which tends the memorial site, said they were in the process of replacing the stolen bust.

Sunday's aborted march to the cemetery was organised by Students Unite, the Selma-based youth group behind a viral online campaign to rename the Edmund Pettus bridge. They planned to march peacefully and respectfully to the graveyard, to draw protest against the Pettus bridge name and the existence of a monument to a white supremacist.

OMFG [VB]==>"The people in the south - the white people, who were being abused - organised a neighbourhood watch to try to re-establish some order," he said of the nascent Klan. Slavery in the south was "a bad institution", he said, but possibly "the mildest, most humane form of slavery ever practiced".

"If you look at the wealth created by the slaves, in food, clothing, shelter, medical care, care before you're old enough to work, care until you died, they got 90% of the wealth that they generated," he said. "I don't get that. The damn government takes my money to the tune of 50%."

Kiscaden and Godwin insisted they were not racist. But they made plain that they hankered for a revival of some of the ideals most Americans believe were defeated in 1865.

According to the arrest report, Diego Chaar, 24, first yelled out "Allahu akbar," which is translated from Arabic as "God is great" or "God is greater."

Police said the Rabbi David Weberman and a witness ignored Chaar, at which point he yelled, "Heads will be cut off" and "I will cut your head off."

The victim feared for his life at that point and called 911. The witness followed Chaar in his vehicle while the victim followed him on foot. Police officers located the suspect hiding behind a car, filled out an incident report and released him at the scene.

The report states Chaar walked by the synagogue again and again began to scream "Allahu akbar." Police were called for a second time, at which point Chaar was taken into custody.

Local 10 News reporter Roger Lohse spoke to Chaar, who admitted saying "Allahu akbar" but said he never threatened anyone.

"This is not a hate crime," Chaar said. "This has nothing to do with them being Jewish. I just want to help them find peace within themselves."

Chaar said he converted to Islam three years ago while serving time in prison on drug charges.

"Christians say 'Jesus saves' all day, every day," Chaar said. "I was a Christian before until I converted. I'm trying to convert these people, but they seem scared. They want to be scared. They want to call the police."

Chaar said the allegations that he threatened them are a lie.

"There's no proof I said I was going to cut their heads off," Chaar said.

Lohse asked Chaar why he would scream "Allahu akbar" in the first place.

"Because I don't want them to burn in eternal hell forever," Chaar said. "I want to help. They're good people."

Award recognizes 132 companies spanning 21 countries and five continents that embrace the correlation between ethical business practices, public trust and improved company performance

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The Ethisphere Institute, the global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices, today announced the 2015 World's Most Ethical Companies(r). The latest list includes 132 companies representing more than 50 industries spanning 21 countries and five continents.

The World's Most Ethical Companies is a distinction that honors superior achievement in transparency, integrity, ethics and compliance. Honorees use ethics as a means to further define their industry leadership and embrace the connection by embedding their corporate values into everything they do, every employee they hire, and every partner they bring into their network to ensure they deliver long-term value to key stakeholders including customers, suppliers, regulators, and investors.

"Companies today are challenged by a complex and often conflicting set of laws and regulations around the world, yet despite the lack of a global rule of law there's a growing commonality about how to do business the right way," explained Ethisphere's Chief Executive Officer Timothy Erblich. "More and more, we're finding that stakeholders from employees and customers to executives and investors understand that ethical leadership drives outcomes ranging from operational performance to corporate integrity, transparency, and workforce behavior. We're delighted to honor these companies who not only understand the various components of what makes a company ethical but are dedicated to building an environment that makes it so."

"This award celebrates doing business the right way and making the right choices every day," said Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, the only automaker to receive the Ethisphere honor for six consecutive years. "Ethical behavior and good corporate citizenship are not just the right things to do, they also make good business sense."

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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/315492_Ethisphere_Announces_the_2015_#rssMon, 09 Mar 2015 05:41:35 PDTBusinessRoad to Selma: a civil rights tour of the South is a ride through endless crime scenes.The Mother Of All PiesDirect link to article... [littlegreenfootballs.com]

The itinerary of a civil rights tour is essentially a long list of crime scenes.

The crime scenes are everywhere, from the trees where blacks were lynched and the avenues where enslaved people were marched from riverboats to auction blocks, to the countless dots on the map of the South where brave dissenters and utter innocents were beaten or killed with fists, boots, baseball bats or guns. Very, very few of the criminals who perpetrated these crimes were ever brought to justice because local and state governments and the courts were on their side.

On Monday, our busload of 52 civil rights pilgrims arrived in Birmingham, Ala., a city once known as "Bombingham." In the 1950s and '60s, it was the place where the hardest lines of segregation were drawn and violence was commonplace. It was the city where fire hoses were trained on black boys and girls and attack dogs were loosed on peaceful demonstrators. And it was where, on one Sabbath morning in 1963, a terrorist's bomb placed at the 16th Street Baptist Church killed four black girls who were straightening their dresses and checking their hair in preparation for Sunday school.

Earlier in Montgomery, the Alabama capital, we had met Georgette Norman, a dynamic, eloquent black woman who recently retired as director of the city's Rosa Parks Museum. When she talked about how things used to be, she was blunt.

"I grew up in a world of state-sponsored terrorism," Norman said to us after we dined on Southern food at Martha's Place Buffet. In her opinion, the country has not really come to terms with the pervasiveness of that terrorism nor with the chronic social and economic after-effects that are still with us. After Sept. 11, Americans are all too cognizant of the terror that has come from outside our borders, says Norman, but "we have yet to claim the terror within."

Bernard Lafayette, who faced that terror very directly, talked to us at the museum housed in the former Montgomery Greyhound bus station, the site where a white mob viciously attacked nonviolent Freedom Riders in 1961. Lafayette was one of those riders. He recalled the searing moment when members of the mob turned on him and broke three of his ribs while white women across the street, holding babies in their arms, shrieked their encouragement.

At the state Capitol, our tour guide, Aroine Irby, a retired Air Force colonel, went off script as he showed us around the portico where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America. As a young man half a century ago, Irby said, he had joined the march from Selma to Montgomery and was walking beside a woman and her four children at the moment she was gunned down by a shooter hiding somewhere in the thicket.

In slightly under three weeks, Israel will be holding its 20th parliamentary election, which was declared after a long period of internal power struggles within the ruling coalition. Eventually, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to dissolve the Knesset (Israel's parliament) after less than two years out of a four-year term. The initial public response to the election was outrage, with the common opinion being that the election is a waste of public funds caused by ego-driven quarrels rather than legitimate policy disagreements. However, that sentiment seems to have withered down as the election became more competitive and surprising.

Political parties in Israel can be categorized into five groups: Right, center, left, ultra-orthodox ("Haredi") and Arabs. The right consists of Likud, the Jewish Home, and Yisrael Beiteinu. In the center we can find two parties: Yesh Atid and Kulanu. The left parties are the Zionist Camp (a union of Labor and Ha'tnua) and Meretz. In a historic move, the Arab parties decided to unite in the coming election and to run together as one united party. The Haredi (ultra-orthodox) parties also considered the idea of unity briefly but eventually decided to stay as separate parties: United Torah Judaism party (UTJ) for the Ashkenazi Haredis, Shas party for the Sephardic Haredis and Yachad for the hard-right wing Haredis.

The current government was formed by a coalition of center-right parties, in contrast to the right-Haredi coalition who ruled before. However, the coming election might put an end to the Netanyahu regime, which has been in power since 2009. The alternative to Netanyahu is the political couple Issac Hertzog and Tzipi Livni. Together, they lead the Zionist Camp alliance and aim to bring the Labor party back to power for the first time since 2001. Do they have a chance? The polls suggests a complicated answer.

The first thing that pops up is just how close the leading parties are, with just one seat separating them. However, what bothers the Zionist Camp is not so much the number of votes it will receive but rather the number of votes that will be cast in favor of the political center.

Republicans had better divert some of their campaign cash toward finding a cure for Obama Derangement Syndrome. If they don't, their nemesis will beat them in a third consecutive presidential contest -- without, of course, actually being on the ballot.

GOP power brokers and potential candidates surely realize that President Obama is ineligible to run in 2016. Yet they seem unable to get over the fact that he won in 2008 and 2012. It's as if they are more interested in vainly trying to rewrite history than attempting to lay out a vision for the future.

Obama Derangement Syndrome is characterized by feverish delirium. The Republican Party suffered an episode last week when former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani began speaking in tongues about Obama's patriotism.

"I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America," Giuliani said. "He doesn't love you. And he doesn't love me. He wasn't brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country."

This is obviously a nonsensical thing to say about a man who was elected president twice and has served as commander in chief for more than six years. Pressed to explain himself, Giuliani ranted and raved for several days about Obama's upbringing, made demonstrably false claims about the president's supposed denial of American exceptionalism, insisted that "I said exactly what I wanted to say" -- and then finally issued a non-retraction retraction in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

"My blunt language suggesting that the president doesn't love America notwithstanding, I didn't intend to question President Obama's motives or the content of his heart," Giuliani wrote. But of course he did intend to question Obama's motives, heart, patriotism and legitimacy, albeit in a self-destructive, laughingstock kind of way.

Giuliani can perhaps be dismissed; his future in presidential politics is as bleak as his past, which consists of one spectacularly unsuccessful run for the GOP nomination. But if he was speaking as the party's id, surely Republicans who consider themselves in the mix for 2016 would play the role of superego and tamp down such baser instincts. Right?

Wrong. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker -- a guest at the dinner where Giuliani had his eruption -- refused to repudiate the offending remarks. "The mayor can speak for himself," he said. "I'm not going to comment on whether, what the president thinks or not. . . . I'll tell you I love America, and I think there are plenty of people, Democrat, Republican, independent and everyone in between, who love this country."

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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/315223_Wingnuts_+_Moonbats_Turn_Fireh#rssMon, 23 Feb 2015 11:06:40 PSTWingnutsNorwegian Muslims Will Form a Human Shield Around an Oslo SynagogueThe Mother Of All PiesDirect link to article... [littlegreenfootballs.com]

The headlines have been grim. Europe's Jews face "rising anti-Semitism"; in some countries, many are leaving in "record numbers." In separate incidents in recent months, gunmen have targeted Jews and Jewish institutions in Paris and Copenhagen. Even the Jewish dead have not been left in peace, with reports of graves being desecrated.

But the future of tolerance and multiculturalism in Europe is far from bleak. The bigotry on view has been carried out by a fringe minority, cast all the more in the shade by the huge peace marches and vigils that followed the deadly attacks. And some communities are trying to build solidarity in their home towns and cities.

One group of Muslims in Norway plans to form a "ring of peace" around a synagogue in Oslo on Saturday. On a Facebook page promoting the event, the group explained its motivations. Here's a translated version of the invite:

Islam is about protecting our brothers and sisters, regardless of which religion they belong to. Islam is about rising above hate and never sinking to the same level as the haters. Islam is about defending each other. Muslims want to show that we deeply deplore all types of hatred of Jews, and that we are there to support them. We will therefore create a human ring around the synagogue on Saturday 21 February. Encourage everyone to come!

A man in Canada on trial for plotting to derail a passenger train also wanted to make Yellowstone supervolcano erupt, a Toronto court has heard.

Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, wanted to trigger a catastrophic volcanic eruption at Yellowstone National Park but ended up dismissing the idea because it would have been too difficult, a court heard.

An undercover FBI agent told how Esseghaier, a Montreal PhD student from Tunisia,and co-accused Raed Jaser, a Palestinian dispatcher from Ontario, talked about the "death and destruction" a blast from Yellowstone would cause.

"Wouldn't it be great if my enemies' worst national disaster could happen?" the agent told the court Esseghaier said.

In 1919, in the wake of World War I, African American sharecroppers unionized in Arkansas, unleashing a wave of white vigilantism and mass murder that left 237 people dead.

The visits began in the fall of 1918, just as World War I ended. At his office in Little Rock, Arkansas, attorney Ulysses S. Bratton listened as African American sharecroppers from the Delta told stories of theft, exploitation, and endless debt. A man named Carter had tended 90 acres of cotton, only to have his landlord seize the entire crop and his possessions. From the town of Ratio, in Phillips County, Arkansas, a black farmer reported that a plantation manager refused to give sharecroppers an itemized account for their crop. Another sharecropper told of a landlord trying "to starve the people into selling the cotton at his own price. They ain't allowing us down there room to move our feet except to go to the field."

No one could know it at the time, but within a year these inauspicious meetings would lead to one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history. Initiated by whites, the violence--by any measure, a massacre--claimed the lives of 237 African Americans, according to a just released report from the Equal Justice Initiative. The death toll was unusually high, but the use of racial violence to subjugate blacks during this time was not uncommon. As the Equal Justice Initiative observes, "Racial terror lynching was a tool used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation--a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community, not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime." This was certainly true of the massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas.

Bratton agreed to represent the cheated sharecroppers, who also joined a new union, the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Its founder, a black Delta native named Robert Hill, had no prior organizing experience but plenty of ambition. "The union wants to know why it is that the laborers cannot control their just earnings which they work for," Hill announced as he urged black sharecroppers to each recruit 25 prospective members to form a lodge. Hill was especially successful in Phillips County, where seven lodges were established in 1919.

It took a lot of courage to defy the Arkansas Delta's white elite. Men such as E.M. "Mort" Allen controlled the local economy, government, law enforcement, and courts. Allen was a latter-day carpetbagger, a Northerner who had come to Arkansas in 1906 to make his fortune. He married well and formed a partnership with a wealthy businessman. Together they developed the town of Elaine, a hub for the thriving lumber industry. Allen and the county's white landowners understood that their continued prosperity depended on the exploitation of black sharecroppers and laborers. In a county where more than 75 percent of the population was African American, this wasn't a task to be taken lightly. In February 1919, the planters agreed to reduce the acreage of cotton in cultivation in anticipation of a postwar drop in demand. If they gave their tenants a fair settlement, their profits would shrink further. Allen spoke for the planters when he declared that "the old Southern methods are much the best," and that the "Southern men can handle the negroes all right and peaceably."

There was nothing "peaceable" about the methods used to demolish the sharecroppers' union. Late on the night of September 30, 1919, the planters dispatched three men to break up a union meeting in a rough hewn black church at Hoop Spur, a crossroads three miles north of Elaine. Prepared for trouble, the sharecroppers had assigned six men to patrol outside the church. A verbal confrontation led to gunfire that fatally wounded one of the attackers. The union men dispersed, but not for long. Bracing for reprisals from their landlords, they rousted fellow sharecroppers from bed and formed self-defense forces.

The planters also mobilized. Sheriff Frank Kitchens deputized a massive white posse, even setting up a headquarters at the courthouse in the county seat of Helena to organize his recruits. Hundreds of white veterans, recently returned from military service in France, flocked to the courthouse. Dividing into small groups, the armed white men set out into the countryside to search for the sharecroppers. The posse believed that a black conspiracy to murder white planters had just been begun and that they must do whatever it took to put down the alleged uprising. The result was the killing of 237 African Americans.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- In late 2013, an A.T.M. in Kiev started dispensing cash at seemingly random times of day. No one had put in a card or touched a button. Cameras showed that the piles of money had been swept up by customers who appeared lucky to be there at the right moment.

But when a Russian cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky Lab, was called to Ukraine to investigate, it discovered that the errant machine was the least of the bank's problems.

The bank's internal computers, used by employees who process daily transfers and conduct bookkeeping, had been penetrated by malware that allowed cybercriminals to record their every move. The malicious software lurked for months, sending back video feeds and images that told a criminal group -- including Russians, Chinese and Europeans -- how the bank conducted its daily routines, according to the investigators.

Then the group impersonated bank officers, not only turning on various cash machines, but also transferring millions of dollars from banks in Russia, Japan, Switzerland, the United States and the Netherlands into dummy accounts set up in other countries.

In a report to be published on Monday, and provided in advance to The New York Times, Kaspersky Lab says that the scope of this attack on more than 100 banks and other financial institutions in 30 nations could make it one of the largest bank thefts ever -- and one conducted without the usual signs of robbery.

The Moscow-based firm says that because of nondisclosure agreements with the banks that were hit, it cannot name them. Officials at the White House and the F.B.I. have been briefed on the findings, but say that it will take time to confirm them and assess the losses.

Kaspersky Lab says it has seen evidence of $300 million in theft through clients, and believes the total could be triple that. But that projection is impossible to verify because the thefts were limited to $10 million a transaction, though some banks were hit several times. In many cases the hauls were more modest, presumably to avoid setting off alarms.

The majority of the targets were in Russia, but many were in Japan, the United States and Europe.

No bank has come forward acknowledging the theft, a common problem that President Obama alluded to on Friday when he attended the first White House summit meeting on cybersecurity and consumer protection at Stanford University. He urged passage of a law that would require public disclosure of any breach that compromised personal or financial information.

Looks like this was a "whaling expedition" and they harpooned Moby Dick.

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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/315047_Bank_Hackers_in_Russia_Steal_M#rssSun, 15 Feb 2015 19:12:59 PSTCrimeThe First Victims of the First CrusadeThe Mother Of All PiesDirect link to article... [littlegreenfootballs.com]

THE first victims of the First Crusade, inspired in 1096 by the supposedly sacred mission of retaking Jerusalem from Muslims, were European Jews. Anyone who considers it religiously and politically transgressive to compare the behavior of medieval Christian soldiers to modern Islamic terrorism might find it enlightening to read this bloody story, as told in both Hebrew and Christian chronicles.

The message from the medieval past is that religious violence seldom limits itself to one target and expands to reach the maximum number of available victims.

Just as the Crusades were integrally linked to Roman Catholicism in the Middle Ages, terrorist movements today are immersed in a particular anti-modern interpretation of Islam. This does not imply that a majority of Muslims agree with violent religious ideology. It does mean that the terrorists' brand of belief plays a critical role in their savage assault on human rights.

Cultural ignoramuses portrayed President Obama's references to the Crusades and the Inquisition at the recent National Prayer Breakfast as an excuse for Islamic terrorism, but the president's allusions could and should have been used as an opportunity to reflect on the special damage inflicted in many historical contexts by warriors seeking conquest in the name of their god.

Times were hard in northern Europe when the crusaders began to gather in the spring of 1096. A disappointing harvest in 1095 had brought famine to the poor. As James Carroll observes in "Constantine's Sword," there is "no doubt the crusading impulse rescued many serfs, but also landowners, from desperate economic straits."

Pope Urban II did not tell crusaders to murder Jews, but that is what happened when at least 100,000 knights, vassals and serfs, unmoored from ordinary social restraints but bearing the standard of the cross, set off to crush what they considered a perfidious Muslim enemy in a faraway land. Why not practice on that older group accused of perfidy -- the Jews?

The city of Trier, on the Moselle River, was one of the early stops. The Jews were, according to a Hebrew chronicle, offered the choice of conversion, exile or death -- similar to the choices offered by groups like the Islamic State and Boko Haram. After the Jews of Trier made an unsuccessful attempt, by paying off a bishop, to persuade the crusaders to bypass their community, they sought refuge in the prelate's palace.

The chronicle recounts that "the bishop's military officer and ministers entered the palace and said to them: 'Thus said our lord the bishop: Convert or leave this place. I do not wish to preserve you any longer.' " It goes on: " 'You cannot be saved -- your God does not wish to save you now as he did in earlier days.' "

Well wishers from the Jewish community react as they bring flowers and light candles to honour the shooting victims outside the main Synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark on February 15, 2015. AFP PHOTO / ODD ANDERSEN

Denmark - What should have been the happiest moments of Chana Bentov's life turned into a nightmare of epic proportions as the 12 year old's bat mitzvah celebration was punctuated by the sounds of gunshots in the night.

Journalist Eva Blum fled to the basement of The Copenhagen Synagogue with her 15 year old son during the terror attack, which took the life of Dan Uzan, as previously reported on VIN News. Blum spoke with Israeli news site Maariv (http://goo.gl/WMm8EU ) and described what happened inside the synagogue as terror reigned in the streets of Copenhagen.

"We were more than 50 children and adults together," said Blum. "We were at the bat mitzvah and we were dancing and suddenly the security guard came and screamed 'turn off the music and go down to the basement.' We raced downstairs quickly, not even taking our telephones or our bags."

While the group originally congregated in the basement, they were told to move into a more secure area, deeper inside the basement.

"We knew then that something bad had happened," said Blum. "We were there for close to two hours. It was very hot and the children were frightened. The father of the bat mitzvah girl overheard the police and the security guards talking and he told just us, the adults, that one of the security people had been shot. We hid this from the children. We just told them that that there had been an attack and that we were being guarded."

As students at Copenhagen's Jewish school, the children at the party had all participated in drills to prepare them for a potential security breach.

"They know what the word means," said Blum. "They are prepared. But this time it was real. This time what we planned for and have always feared actually happened."

The scariest moments, according to Blum, came when dozens of armed police officers came to evacuate them from the building.

"Each one of the adults took a child, or several children in hand," recalled Blum. "Imagine what it is like to run with a shoeless child, through roads full of armed policemen. It is frightening."

The children, many of whom were unaccompanied by their own parents, held up admirably according to Blum.

"We couldn't call their parents," said Blum. "We had no phones. The children were scared but they were ready for something like this."

A Mississippi state lawmaker said he opposed putting more money into elementary schools because he came from a town where "all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call 'welfare crazy checks.' They don't work."

In an interview with the Clarion-Ledger regarding education funding, state Rep. Gene Alday (R) stated his opposition to a push to increase funding to improve elementary school reading scores. Alday implied that increasing education funding for children in black families would be pointless.

Alday continued, saying that when he was mayor of Walls, MS, that the times he'd gone to the emergency room had taken a long time. "I laid in there for hours because they (blacks) were in there being treated for gunshots," he told the newspaper.

The idea for the policy came from Florida, where the state invested about $1 billion into schools to pay for reading coaches, teachers and increased attention to students who struggled with reading.

The Mississippi legislature recently advanced a bill that would provide exceptions to the reading policy for students with learning disabilities. The bill is opposed by Gov. Phil Bryant (R), who supports the third grade gate policy.

In the mid-1990s, near the end of the period during which she lived in Israel, Jennifer Teege watched Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List." She hadn't seen the film in a movie theater, and watched it in her rented room in Tel Aviv when it was broadcast on television.

"It was a moving experience for me, but I didn't learn much about the Holocaust from it," she tells me by phone from her home in Hamburg, mostly in English with a sprinkling of Hebrew. "I'd learned and read a great deal about the Holocaust before that. At the time I thought the film was important mainly because it heightened international awareness of the Holocaust, but I didn't think I had a personal connection to it."

Indeed, it was not until years later that Teege, a German-born black woman who was given up for adoption as a child, discovered that one of the central characters in the film, Amon Goeth, was her grandfather. Many viewers recall the figure of Goeth, the brutal commander of the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland - played in the film by Ralph Fiennes - from the scenes in which he shoots Jewish inmates from the porch of his home. But Teege, who had not been in touch with either her biological mother or biological grandmother for years, had no idea about the identity of her grandfather.

The discovery came like a bolt from the blue in the summer of 2008, when she was 38 years old, as she relates in the memoir "Amon," which was published in German in 2013 (co-authored with the German journalist Nikola Sellmair), and is due out in English this April under the title "My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past."

Teege is scheduled to visit Israel next week to take part in events marking the book's publication in Hebrew (from Sifriat Poalim), at the International Book Fair in Jerusalem, the University of Haifa and the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv.

She opens her book by describing the 2008 visit to a library in Hamburg to look for material on coping with depression. While there, she happened to notice a book with a cover photograph of a familiar figure: her biological mother, Monika Hertwig (née Goeth). She immediately withdrew the book, titled "I Have to Love My Father, Right?," and which was based on an interview with her mother.

"The first shock was the sheer discovery of a book about my mother and my family, which had information about me and my identity that had been kept hidden from me," Teege says. "I knew almost nothing about the life of my biological mother, nor did my adoptive family. I hoped to find answers to questions that had disturbed me and to the depression I had suffered from. The second shock was the information about my grandfather's deeds."

I was mortified. It's official, the thing I have railed against in my crusade for culinary and cultural justice had come for me: my name, established long before someone got the bright idea for a merger of ethnic stereotypes, has been compromised by your "sense" of "koshersoul."

Appropriation--the big word that seems to have been repeatedly hurled from London to Tokyo--un-reciprocated and unwelcome borrowing, or if you will outright theft of the cultural and artistic production of "others" seems too obvious to even whisper here so I will leave it up to my readers to decide whether you in bad faith decided to nab my moniker for your own purposes or if you just carelessly decided to ignore my work when naming your program.

The "others" I mention above are we the people who in our struggles to make this a more perfect Union, are often marginalized and robbed of our ability to rise and achieve by being denied the same platform as those appropriating our creations. There is a difference between respectful quoting, acknowledging sources and origins and sharing words, genres, styles and modes on the one hand and lifting them wholesale and using them in ways that diminish and demean originators.

The promo trailer for "Kosher Soul" shows a classic collision of cultures- and who could be more different than "the Blacks" and "the Jews?" What could be funnier than a Black man passing out from the sacred ritual of hatafat-dam-brit (blood drop circumcision)? Ooh his baseball cap says "Kosher" in thug motif! Her mother is skeptical, the Jews and their customs are so bizarre that it's a guilty pleasure you can't wait to shmear your eyes with. Goodness gracious glory be to Hashem-this TV show sho' do "look so funny." (How easy the sarcasm flows...)

Because it "look so funny," (sic) things will be slow to change. We will go on believing that to be Black is monolithic and to be Jewish only means Ashkenazi; or that Blacks have to be invited into Jewish civilization, not that we have always been a part of it from the Jews of Ethiopia to Harlem synagogues in the 1920's and far beyond. Despite this we we have to remind the entertainment media that we've done this stereotype/archetype game before, it's so tired, so boring, so basic. In the shadow of Ferguson, in the clearing haze of the Chapel Hill shooting, television seems to have abdicated making cross-cultural understanding possible in exchange for preserving Old World demons and New World canards. Because the world believes what it sees, and perception "is reality," it means that real people suffer because their vision and their truth rarely make it to the screen or page.

James Robertson's story is emblematic of a new reality in the manufacturing business: Factory jobs no longer represent a guaranteed ladder to economic vitality.

Call it the Robertson economy.

The 56-year-old Detroiter's story of walking 21 miles each day to an injection-molding job -- first told Feb. 1 in the Free Press -- captivated, inspired and horrified readers. The public spontaneously raised more than $350,000 for Robertson's cause -- all while raining down contempt through social media on his employer, Schain Mold & Engineering in Rochester Hills, for paying him just $10.55 per hour.

The fact is, experts say and statistics show that low-wage manufacturing jobs are part of a new normal in the labor markets of the U.S. and metro Detroit following decades of globalization and the Great Recession.

Many companies have even stopped hiring full time and are relying more on temporary workers who do not necessarily receive benefits.

"We may not like factory work at $10 per hour when we're used to them paying $28, but that's the market wage," said Lou Glazer, president of the nonpartisan Ann Arbor-based think tank Michigan Future.

Following the explosion of publicity and social media criticism and threats directed at Schain, company managers were reluctant to talk to the Free Press about their business.

Robertson's extreme commute is shocking and reflects a fundamentally broken mass-transit system. But his job? His job is the new normal in manufacturing. Globalization forces producers into a desperate, penny-for-penny competition for customers.

In the Robertson economy, either the wages stay low, or the work goes away, somewhere overseas or South of the border. Manufacturing wages have stagnated at lower levels because it's easy for companies to outsource work to low-cost manufacturers around the globe.

Union proponents see Robertson's compensation as symbolic of a structural problem plaguing America that public policymakers must address.

Cindy Estrada, a vice president of the UAW, decried the impact of low-wage manufacturing jobs on families.

Estrada, who leads contract bargaining with General Motors and multibillion-dollar automotive suppliers, said that, regrettably, a $10.55-per-hour wage is not unusual for workers in the U.S. auto parts industry. Companies such as Lear and Faurecia pay workers less than $15 per hour in some factories, she said.

"The wage is not an anomaly," Estrada said. "There is a Wal-Marting of the manufacturing sector that people need to learn about."

But the consternation over low manufacturing wages disguises what has become an emerging trade-off: Low wages breed more jobs.

Some of the biggest names in the national debate over vaccine safety were given the Hollywood treatment Wednesday at the premiere of a documentary challenging mainstream medicine's denial that there's a link between autism and childhood vaccines.

The airing of "Trace Amounts" at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood comes as the current measles outbreak continues to grow and the debate over vaccines becomes louder.

In true Hollywood style, the event drew its celebrities: area pediatricians Bob Sears and Jay Gordon, who have publicly supported parents who choose to delay or deny vaccines for their children, wore suits and milled among the well-heeled attendees arriving for the premiere.

"People realize that measles are still around, that vaccines are worth discussing," Gordon said.

But much of the debate has been unpleasant, he added, with everyone "looking for a demon in this."

It was a rare moment in the spotlight for a group that has been increasingly shunned and chastised. Though anti-vaccine proponents say they are doing what they believe is best for their children, pro-vaccine parents argue that choosing not to vaccinate puts the overall health of a community at risk.

Possible legislative change in California also threatens to restrict parents' ability to obtain a "personal belief" exemption from state-required vaccinations.

Sears said he fought even the current exemption rules and would likewise oppose any further restriction. He blamed those behind it for "panicking and unfairly taking advantage of the hype and hysteria."

In a series of Facebook posts obtained by ThinkProgress, the senior adviser for policy and communications to Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) posted racial comments and endorsed gentrification of his neighborhood.

Benjamin Cole, a former Baptist pastor and energy industry spokesman, posted a series of videos and comments on October 13, 2013 mocking two African Americans outside his DC apartment. In the first, he compared them to animals escaping from the National Zoo engaged in "mating rituals." That message included a video of a woman, shouting and seemingly engaged in an argument with someone not visible as she walked. In each of his posts, he used the hashtag "#gentrifytoday."

The National Zoo was closed that week due to a federal government shutdown.

The posts appeared to have been removed Wednesday.

Later that year, Cole described witnessing a shooting of "one of the hood rats on my street" by "another hood rat."

Men now outnumber women on the planet by 60 million, the highest ever recorded. Preference for sons in India and China is driving the trend, but those two countries are not the only ones struggling with an imbalanced population. Here's a look at five decades of data: